RIP Corey Haim
- Image by ProfessorMortis via Flickr
I had planned a rant about healthcare for today, but this morning I read the news that one of the most ever-present fixtures in the movies of my childhood is dead.
Corey Haim is only one of a string of young stars from the 80s to meet an unhappy end, and it wasn’t all that unexpected, considering his well-known issues with drugs. However he died, he was still appreciated for what he had given to a generation of confused adolescents.
Goodbye, Corey. It’s sad to see you go.
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All About The Grammar
- Image by .imelda via Flickr
I tend to play it a bit loose with the grammar in the conversational style of my blog, especially when I’m in too much of a hurry with a post to give it a quick proofread before I hit that publish button. Despite that, I am a devoted grammar nerd.
Unfortunately, National Grammar Day seems to have completely passed me by this week, without much more recognition than a slightly belated tweet. I thought I’d rectify that by offering up some of my most beloved grammar related resources.
Two things might jump out at you as being odd for grammar manuals: Both of them are short, and both of them are an absolute pleasure to read.
The first is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I cannot stress how essential I consider this book for any writer. It is the best grammar manual ever written. It doesn’t contain everything that the 3000 page text you were likely assigned in college does, but it doesn’t have to. What it does contain, distilled into the most concise and compact form, is all the necessities. True to William Strunk’s admonishment to, above all, be concise, it is also tiny. My favorite version of this book is the illustrated version, where such example phrases as “Wondering irresolutely what to do next, the clock struck twelve.” are turned into beautiful watercolors by Maira Kalman.
The second book I recommend is devoted entirely to punctuation. Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, by Lynn Truss, takes its name from the following common grammar-nerd joke:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.’Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
‘Well, I’m a panda’, he says, at the door. ‘Look it up.’
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. ‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.’
The book is written in a wonderful tongue-in-cheek style that’ll leave you giggling over the horrendous mistakes people make without even realizing they’ve done so. It has a chapter devoted to all the most commonly used punctuation marks and their proper use. This book is for all of us who have ever desperately wanted to strike out a misplaced apostrophe or give random people lectures on the beauty of the interrobang.
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Geek Crafts
- Image by Sterin via Flickr
On top of being a writer, gamer, sci-fi addict, and bibliophile, I have another obsession: Crafts.
From the first moment my aunt taught me how to embroider, or my grandmother explained the inner workings of her ancient Singer sewing machine (while making my Rainbow Brite Halloween costume, no less) I was hooked. Eventually, I taught myself how to macrame, crochet, knit, decoupage, bead-weave, and even solder.
I have a serious case of ferret-mind when it comes to crafting projects as well. I’ll get about halfway through one project when, “Oooh, shiny!” another project grabs my interest. It’s usually the “ordinary” projects that sit about unfinished, though. My interests in crafting follow the same track as my interests in everything else:
I like my crafts geeky, funny, and cute. Right now, I’m about a foot into a Season 16 Tom Baker Era Doctor Who Scarf. You know, the extra long and apparently impervious to harm scarf that the Doc used for everything from measuring to rappelling. This, of course, goes right along with my reawakened Doctor Who obsession. Why do I want a Tom Baker scarf? It’s not for a costume or anything. Pretty much I want one because I can.
I’ve also found myself watching a lot more TV lately since I’ve cut back on Warcraft, and I’ve never been very good at just sitting still and watching anything. That’s why I tend to prefer interactive activities, like video games. If I’m going to be watching TV for a long time, I want something else to do with myself too, like knitting, crocheting, sewing, snuggling with the BF, etc.
Mrraghrgrrrlggglrrgraghrggrlll!
I have other geeky crafting projects waiting in the wings too. I still want to make that Super Mario Blanket, if I can ever get my chart-maker working again. (It crapped out while I was trying to make the pattern.) I really want to make a handful of knitted murlocs to give away to folks who would appreciate a knitted murloc.
And, of course, there are the costumes. I still have a utility-belt-bustle to make to finish off my Con steampunk costume, and I’d really like to use some of the LED and lighting techniques from my new craft-book Fashion Geek. The idea of using electronics in fashion and crafts is so amazingly geeky and awesome that I can’t wait to play around with it a bit.
I’ve been really excited to see the number of equally geeky folks my age embracing crafts and DIY stuff as part of the growing Maker culture. It’s so nice and satisfying to create something with your own hands.
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Cars
I’m going this afternoon to pick up my new car, a spiffy 2010 Toyota Corolla that I’m getting an excellent deal on. I’m a bit of a nervous wreck.
See, the last car I bought, I bought while I was still in college/grad school, and my grandfather did everything short of actually signing the papers for me. He found the car, did all of the bargaining, talked to the bank about getting me a loan, etc. etc.
This time, but for my mom conferring with a friend of hers at another Toyota dealership, I did most of the shopping around myself. I researched cars, I figured out what I wanted, how much I could afford, all that nice stuff. My mom and boyfriend went with me to the dealership Saturday for moral support (and to help me ask the right questions when I get all shy and tongue-tied), and I’ve been offered a really great deal.
So, this time tomorrow, I will be the owner of a brand-new shiny automobile. Eeek!
And on that note: Does anyone want to buy a hard-driven Galapagos Green 2003 Honda Civic? I happen to have a spare.
Another reason why self-publishing is a bad idea…
It’s getting easier and easier to sell self-published books even through mainstream dealers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com, largely thanks to the e-book “revolution.” However, I’d warn my fellow writers against doing such a thing unless they are already well-established and guaranteed good sales. (Wil Wheaton self-publishes through Lulu, and though he has a niche fanbase, it is well established and he already has reliable sales-numbers.)
It may be incredibly gratifying to finally see your name on the cover of a book, in a store, but for an unestablished author, this may be shooting yourself in the foot. Say you self-publish that first book and it sells a few copies, mostly to friends and family, of course, and a few others. Then, miracle of all miracles, your next book gets picked up by a Big Name Publisher. Big Name Publisher has more resources at its disposal and wants to make money from your book, so it will go out and promote it heavily.
However, the bookstores they try to market your book to pull up your name as the author and look at how many of your other books it has sold, and the number of books it buys is based on that. Big Name Publisher sees that the bookstores aren’t interested in selling your books, and that’s that.
There have been authors who have had to change their names just to get away from the low sales figures attached to their initial self-published books. This is not the path to a spot on the Bestseller lists, it is actually likely to work against you ever having that opportunity, no matter how good your writing is. If you choose to self-publish in spite of the problems with it, I’d recommend using a pseudonym. You can always come back and “reclaim” the book under your real name later if you do get the real big break, as Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman) and Anne Rice (A. N. Roquelaire) have done.
Offering writing for free over the internet to gain an audience is, however, a good way of promoting yourself, but even then you have to be careful. The same easy self-publishing platforms that authors are beginning to take advantage of are being used by unscrupulous publishers to steal content and offer it for sale.
Creative Commons offers an easy way to protect and license your content, but be careful that you do not accidentally sign away your rights to any money that is made from it. If you choose to license your work with Creative Commons, make sure to choose a license that ensures that your work can only be used and shared non-commercially – that is, people are free to download, read, and share, but not sell, your work. You can still offer your books for free over the internet with a full copyright rather than a CC license without giving up any rights to it at all.
Like I say, though you earn nothing from it, offering free samples or even complete books for free can be an excellent way to begin to gain an audience, as well as giving you a place to direct potential agents and publishers to so that they can easily see what you’ve done. The trick is to be careful and to keep a watch on the most popular self-publishing and e-book publishing websites to ensure that your work does not get stolen.
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Times, they are a changin’
Occasionally, I hear despair about how horrible the world is, how filled with bigotry and hate, how so many people are more interested in reviling others for their differences rather than embracing them for their uniqueness.
People don’t like change. As Terry Pratchett’s benevolent dictator, Patrician Vetinari said, “‘They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.”
This is why big, revolutionary changes never go over very easily. For big changes, it takes fighting and protests and arguing and, yes, revolutions. Sometimes it seems like everyone gets so bogged down in the arguing that there can never be any change, that people can never change, and things can never get better.
But you have to take stock of the small victories, the things that have happened quietly and slowly, without much notice from anyone. The changes for the better that sneak up and whisper in such little ways that people accept without question, because they’re so small that people barely realize anything has changed at all.
Today I saw two young men walking through a store holding hands. They couldn’t have been more than high-school age, and they did this as if it was no big deal, rather than the declaration of defiance and rebellion that it would have been for anyone my age. To be out-of-the-closet, much less to be seen holding hands and being affectionate with one of your own sex in public, would have been unheard of in my area when I was in high school.
What a difference in the space of a decade. I wanted to cheer them on, thank them for being so brave, to do such a thing in what is still, at least here, a very hostile public. So simple, holding hands – unless you’ve experienced being told that you can’t, that it’s wrong, that you’re wrong for being what you are.
The changes between age-groups and generations was just as evident with the election of President Obama. It was a great victory for equality, with this first black president, but the youth and children being interviewed about it almost universally seemed to be shrugging and saying “So what?” It’s not a big deal. They’re the beginning of true color-blindness.
These aren’t symptoms of apathy, of a “don’t care” attitude, but children and teenagers who never thought that such a thing was near-to-impossible, who never thought that they had to hide who they are or risk everything, who it never occurred to to be afraid of being different.
These are small victories in the way people think about the world and each other, small victories that are barely noticed. It means that there is progress. That people can change. That bigotry and hate can be conquered, even if in small steps.
Not Everything Animated is for Kids…
- Image via Wikipedia
This kind of goes along with my previous post concerning the way censorship and ratings in the US tends to be heavy-handed when it comes to nudity while allowing all sorts of violence to be branded “kid-friendly.”
There’s a phenomenon that I come across fairly regularly where people will ignore the ratings on a piece of media, buy the piece of media for their children, and then complain that “OH MY GOD, SUCHANDSUCH HAS NAKED PEOPLE/LOTS OF BLOOD AND GORE/HORRIFIC IMAGERY THAT MY PERFECT CHILD SHOULD NEVER SEE WITH THEIR INNOCENT EYES!”
At which point I tend to want to take the package, point at the rating (which inevitably is M, R, NC-17, etc.) and go “Yeah? That’s why it’s rated for ADULTS ONLY!”
At which point I get a blank look, and/or: “But it’s a cartoon/video game/comic book/etc. and cartoons/video games/comic books/etc. are meant for kids.”
Where did this come from, this automatic assumption that just because something drawn, either with traditional animation or art media or digitally, it therefore is intended primarily for children? This is almost certainly a purely Western notion, because Japanese anime doesn’t seem to make that assumption (though I have seen Westerners assume thus in regards to Japanese anime).
First of all, as the first generation of at-home gamers (of which I am a proud member) grew up, video games grew up with them. Right now, the vast majority of gamers are ages 25 and up, both male and female. We’ve long ago outgrown shiny happy fairy-tale castles with a pretty pink princess inside, and most of us look for darker, grittier, more cynical, and yes, more realistically violent games. For those of us who are parents, of which there are no small number, most of these games are such that we would never allow our children to play, though we may play them ourselves.
These video games are rated “M”, which is clearly marked on the video game package, along with the translation “For Mature Players.” These are video games that are made for adults. Why, then, do some parents buy these games for their children, ignoring the rating, and then complain about the content?
The same seems to go for any animated cartoon, though shows like Beevis and Butthead, South Park, etc. have made a dent in it, I still see and hear of parents letting their children watch “cartoons” and then throwing a fit when they find out that it has some sort of inflammatory not-for-the-kiddos content in it.
Again, the ratings for these “cartoons” are clearly displayed on the television during the opening credits, are clearly available over the internet for anyone who wants to see them, and yet the parents are raising hell over these shows containing more mature content when they’re clearly marked as being not for kids.
But… but…. but… they’re cartoons.
Yeah? There’s been dirty pictures drawn all over the place since the first caveman picked up a stick of charcoal.
The same “but it’s made for kids” philosophy extends to comic books and any movies based on comic books too, as we all saw with release of Watchmen and the Legendary Blue Wang. I saw plenty of moms and dads leading their little kids into that movie, and then leading them right back out with hands over their eyes. I had to wonder if they had completely failed to notice, on purchasing the ticket, that the movie had a great big “R” next to it?
No, because you see the thing is that these people who ignore the ratings on things and then end up burned inevitably turn on the distributors, the creators, the writers, the artists. They are EVIL EVIL people for exposing their precious children to these things!
But it’s not the creators’ or the distributors’ fault. They made a product that was intended for adult consumption, and clearly marked as such on said product. This mark is a warning for parents, it says “This is not for kids.” If the parent then chooses to ignore that warning, then it’s the parent’s own fault for what they have chosen to expose their child to. You were warned. You chose not to heed that warning. It’s not our fault if you get burned.
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This Valentine’s Day
Will You Be My Valentine?
This Sunday is Valentine’s day, and I thought I’d be a bit silly and romantical and mushy, so if you want to skip the kissing scenes, you might want to click another tab.
This May, I will have been with the same wonderful man for 12 years. We got together near my senior year of high-school, and as such, in a lot of ways, we have grown up together, though, admittedly, we’re still sort of figuring this whole grown-up thing out.
I’ve already gotten my valentine this year, because he was too excited about it to wait. It was a first edition copy of Who Killed Amanda Palmer, signed by Neil Gaiman, which now has a place of honor on a book stand in my living room. His (as he requested) will be a dinner consisting of Nigella Lawson’s Pizza Rustica and some kind of fancy pastry of as-yet undetermined type, because I’m a pretty good baker, when I put my mind to it.
Happy Valentine’s Day. I love you, my Goob.
Games Inspired by Literature
Image via Wikipedia
I was reading this article on Literary Classics that should be made into Video Games on Wired this morning and it got me thinking.
Alice in Wonderland has already been adapted in several different (and sometimes incredibly frightening) ways to video games. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a game now (Dante’s Inferno). Almost every fantasy-based RPG gives a nod to Tolkien (as does nearly every fantasy-based novel). However, I can think of some classics and should-be classics that would make wonderful games.
Wired mentions Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which would definitely make an interesting and very surreal game, but rather than an old-school 8-bit platformer, I’d see it more as an adventure throwing the protagonist into that surreal world where he wakes up one morning as a cockroach. He’d have to suddenly learn to defend himself against humans, including his own family.
Wired’s list is a good one, but there are a few that I would add to it.
Milton’s Paradise Lost would make an excellent game, with the ultimate Antagonist that you can’t help but sympathize with, just a bit. In fact, I would almost propose having Satan be the player’s character (if it wouldn’t bring down the wrath of the fanatics on the developer’s head), or perhaps shifting points-of-view as the poem does. You’d start out playing the Satan, in Hell, and go on to play Adam once the setting switches to Eden. Something between an RPG and a dungeon crawl would be a good format, especially with all the wonderful setting descriptions, and you’d have a built-in sequel with Paradise Regained.
While we’re on the subject of gothic anti-heros, why not games based on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage or Don Juan? What better fodder for an adventure game than the adventures written by Lord Byron, an anti-hero himself? Byronic heroes have appeared quite commonly in video games quite often already, isn’t it about time someone featured the originals? There’s certainly enough sex and violence between the two to titillate even the most prurient of minds, too.
How about a horror game set in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark version of New England? Pulling from his entire catalogue, you could create a game filled with the terrors that ordinary humans are capable of inflicting on their own kind under the pretense of “doing the right thing.” Imagine our game’s hero traveling through a forest only to find that all the people he trusts are doing horrible things in a satanic ritual, or wandering innocently into a town only to be the winner of a lottery that means his death?
We’ve already had plenty of games influenced by Poe and Lovecraft, but no major games entirely based on their work, when you could hardly ask for more game-friendly stories. Why not put Lovecraft’s monsters where they belong, in the stories he created first? Or work your way through Poe’s many traps and puzzles?
Finally, though not exactly accepted as canon literature, games using the stories written by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett would make wonderful games. The Max Payne series already ventured into Noir territory, with an original story but definite influences by Chandler in particular. They’d make excellent first-person shooters, and noir-esque lighting effects would make for some interesting graphics.
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Intelligence and So-Called Elitism
- Image via Wikipedia
There’s a trend out there that I’ve noticed lately where people who are intelligent or who seek to better themselves through higher education and learning are branded as elitists or snobs.
Since when was being smart a bad thing?
I have an excellent education, I’ll admit, and I continually seek to learn new things. In fact, learning is one of my favorite hobbies. I want to know things. So sue me.
But apparently the very fact that I enjoy learning and have sought out that education will cause people to brand me “condescending” or “snobbish” or “elitist” before they even get to know me. This is exactly the tool that is being used by the right-wing to discredit science. The general gist of the argument is that scientists and/or rational-minded people do not care about the common man because they are smart and look down on everyone else.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. While everyone has their own interests, the most highly educated people I know are all out there working to make things better for everyone. They’re out there trying to find ways to make things better for the people who are suffering the most.
For my part, one of the most intelligent people I know only has a high-school diploma. There was never any money for anything more, but just because he could never go to college doesn’t mean he just stopped learning at the age of 18. My grandfather continued his education on his own, reading whatever he could get his hands on to read. And nothing about that thirst for learning turned him into an elitist or a snob. He was a farmer and a postman who did a bit of book-keeping on the side for friends and neighbors who weren’t as good with numbers. He still visits illiterate neighbors to read their mail to them.
Being smart isn’t about how many letters you have behind your name, and being smart doesn’t make someone any sort of elitist or snob, unless they choose to let it. Most of the time, it does the opposite. Through learning, you can’t help but become more aware of the world around you. Turning that education and the brain you were gifted with to trying to help where you can can’t be anything but a good thing.
So tell me, again, when did being smart become bad?
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